6.63.1. Installation of Vim

First, change the default location of the vimrc configuration file to /etc:

echo '#define SYS_VIMRC_FILE "/etc/vimrc"' >> src/feature.h

Prepare Vim for compilation:

./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-multibyte

The meaning of the configure options:

--enable-multibyte

This switch enables support for editing files in multibyte
character encodings. This is needed if using a locale with a
multibyte character set. This switch is also helpful to be
able to edit text files initially created in Linux
distributions like Fedora that use UTF-8 as a default
character set.

Compile the package:

make

To test the results, issue:

make test

However, this test suite outputs a lot of binary data to the
screen, which can cause issues with the settings of the current
terminal. This can be resolved by redirecting the output to a log
file. A successful test will result in the words "ALL DONE" at
completion.

Install the package:

make install

Many users are used to using vi instead of vim. To allow execution of
vim when users
habitually enter vi,
create a symlink for both the binary and the man page in the
provided languages:

By default, Vim's documentation is installed in /usr/share/vim. The following symlink allows the
documentation to be accessed via /usr/share/doc/vim-7.4, making it consistent with
the location of documentation for other packages:

ln -sv ../vim/vim74/doc /usr/share/doc/vim-7.4

If an X Window System is going to be installed on the LFS system,
it may be necessary to recompile Vim after installing X. Vim comes
with a GUI version of the editor that requires X and some
additional libraries to be installed. For more information on this
process, refer to the Vim documentation and the Vim installation
page in the BLFS book at
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/editors.html#postlfs-editors-vim.

6.63.2. Configuring Vim

By default, vim runs
in vi-incompatible mode. This may be new to users who have used
other editors in the past. The “nocompatible” setting is included below to
highlight the fact that a new behavior is being used. It also
reminds those who would change to “compatible” mode that it should be the first
setting in the configuration file. This is necessary because it
changes other settings, and overrides must come after this setting.
Create a default vim
configuration file by running the following:

The set nocompatible
setting makes vim
behave in a more useful way (the default) than the vi-compatible
manner. Remove the “no” to
keep the old vi
behavior. The set
backspace=2 setting allows backspacing over line
breaks, autoindents, and the start of insert. The syntax on parameter enables vim's
syntax highlighting. Finally, the if statement with the set background=dark setting corrects
vim's guess about the
background color of some terminal emulators. This gives the
highlighting a better color scheme for use on the black background
of these programs.

Documentation for other available options can be obtained by
running the following command:

vim -c ':options'

Note

By default, Vim only installs spell files for the English
language. To install spell files for your preferred language,
download the *.spl and optionally,
the *.sug files for your language
and character encoding from ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/spell/
and save them to /usr/share/vim/vim74/spell/.

To use these spell files, some configuration in /etc/vimrc is needed, e.g.:

set spelllang=en,ru
set spell

For more information, see the appropriate README file located at
the URL above.